Comments on: Which terms are you on?

By: Ryan Morrison

Ryan Morrison — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:58:53 +0000

This is an interesting issue and one I’ve come across a number of times during my normal working day.

I work a lot with unsigned bands who often put stuff on My Space or You Tube and many have had fantastic opportunities including gigs and the chance to be on a compilation CD come out of it.

But a number of the bands (especially the more established) have started taking their material down because of these wide open licences sites impose – I know at least 15 groups that removed music from MySpace until the T&Cs were changed.

I completely agree with scot – we need a standard licence across all service providers and for a number of services like MySpace and YouTube this could be achieved easily by doing a Flickr and giving users the choice of assigning a Creative Commons licence to their work.

For sites like the BBC, CNN etc… the Inverse licence is probably more suitable due to the fact that the user libraries don’t exist in the same way as they do for My Space or Flickr.

If all sites that ask for submissions (that might not even be used) subscribed to a standard licence (like Creative Commons for Publishers) then it would make people feel a little more comfortable sharing their work – and this is something that media companies WILL rely on more and more.

By: Scot

Scot — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 17:31:46 +0000

Flickr supports the use of CC licensing, but I did notice that the standard Flickr T&C does grant Flickr the “usual, non evil” rights, irrespective of CC licensing, which I suppose is fair enough – it would be a bit hard for people to share non-commercial CC licensed material on a commercial site otherwise.

I think what’s needed is an “inverse” common license, where Service providers use a standard licence that grants them the rights they need, with a plain language version and CC style graphics. And as the license would come from a single organization (just like the Creative Commons), people would only need to get to grips with one set of service provider licenses, instead of having to dig around and work what’s different between Google’s license and Yahoo’s and MySpace’s etc. The reason why I call it an inverse license is that it’s the service provider setting out the terms and not the rights owner, even though it’s the rights owner granting the license.

By: Paul Dixon

Paul Dixon — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 10:10:51 +0000

Surprised not to see a mention of Creative Commons licences (http://creativecommons.org/) which do provide people with a variety of ways of licencing their own content to others.

[Bill says: CC doesn't really help when you have a license set by the site host that gives the terms on which they will use your material - even if you're using a CC license this will replace it for that site, I believe. We need a content license that hosting companies adopt - perhaps CC will lead in this area? I'll email Larry...]